Phoenix – Day 2

6032012

So day two in Phoenix was a trip planned before we’d left BC. A trip to the Tonto National monument in the Tonto National Forest. Forest?! In a desert? Yup… though admittedly we didn’t see too many trees. A forest of cacti for sure. More than you could shake a stick at. The whole place was way more green and varied than I expected, though I guess there had been recent rains and this was the soak it up and flower season before everything hunkered down for the big sweat as summer approached.

We had three different highlights of the day. We specifically wanted to see the cave dwelling site. The “lower cave dwelling” is about a 10-15 minute walk from the car park. it’s only $3 to get into the park, and that’s good for a whole week. There are some more extensive “higher cave dwellings”, but you have to book ahead and space is very limited. Ironically the day before, there’d been a guided photography tour! The second highlight was the Roosevelt dam on the Roosevelt Lake reservoir. It was an awful lot smaller than I expected, given the size of the lake it was holding back.

Finally, the road back was highlight number three. The Apache Trail. This is basically a packed earth road for 20-odd of its 40-odd miles. But we were in a hire car. Meh.

As promised previously, here’s a few snapshots of some of the sights along the way…

It was indeed a magical couple of hours driving back on the Apache Highway. Not too dusty either. I THINK it had rained in the last little while, but it might well be a different proposition in high summer. Even our little Mazda 2 hire car had AirCon, so I suspect it gets pretty hot.